Phoenix Sinclair beaten, choked, shot in final days, inquiry hears

WINNIPEG — A woman who alerted authorities to the death of a Manitoba girl cried Monday as she testified about the abuse the child endured during her final days.

“They shot at her with a pellet gun and … played a game with her called choking the chicken,” the woman told an inquiry into Phoenix Sinclair’s death.

“Wesley [McKay] would grab her and throw her on the couch and they would all laugh,” the woman, who cannot be identified under a publication ban, continued between sobs.

She said she did not see the abuse herself, but was told about it by two sons she had with Karl Wesley McKay, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the five-year-old girl’s beating death in 2005. McKay was by then living with Phoenix’s mother, Samantha Kematch, who was also convicted in the killing.

The woman’s sons were staying with McKay, Kematch and Phoenix on the Fisher River reserve in the spring and summer of 2005.

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The abuse Phoenix suffered was detailed at Kematch and McKay’s murder trial, which was told the girl was frequently confined to a bare basement room, forced to eat her own vomit and choked until she lost consciousness.

The inquiry is examining how Manitoba child welfare failed to protect Phoenix, who had spent much of her life in foster care or with family friends before being returned to Kematch. Months before Phoenix’s death, social workers paid a short visit to Kematch, didn’t actually see the child, but decided all was well.

In June of 2005, Phoenix died after a brutal assault on the basement floor of the family’s home. McKay and Kematch buried her in a shallow grave near a landfill and continued to pretend she was alive.

The woman testified Monday that she thought Phoenix was staying with other relatives. But in February 2006, one of the woman’s sons told her that Phoenix had been killed by McKay. The woman called authorities. McKay and Kematch were arrested a short time later.

The woman told the inquiry McKay had always been a violent man and had tried to kill her twice in the five years they were together.

“He always fought me where the bruises wouldn’t show. It was always under my clothes.”

On one occasion, she testified, McKay tried to throw her and their infant son down a staircase. Another time, he came at her with a machete.

“[McKay’s] sister gave me a machete because I was alone all the time, and he tried to use that machete on me.”

McKay also had a long record of domestic violence outlined in the province’s family services central database. But social workers never caught on that he had become part of Phoenix’s life.

The inquiry has already heard of a list of failures by social workers.

Social workers were sometimes unaware of who was taking care of Phoenix — usually it was friends of the family or relatives, for days or weeks at a time. In 2003, she was seized from her biological father’s home after a day-long drinking party where suspected gang members were present.

The father was told to undergo alcohol counselling before he could get his daughter back. He didn’t, but regained custody anyway.

The woman who testified Monday lashed out at social workers at one point for their handling of Phoenix’s case.